findability.org

Findability

After years of loyal service, findability.org has retired. This is the last post. Thanks for all of your support and encouragement over the past nine years. Peter Morville is now blogging over at intertwingled.org. See you there!

One of our customers just launched a beta of the most interesting integration of folksonomies and faceted navigation that I've seen so far. It balances the rigidity of facets built from a controlled vocabulary with the potential anarchy of raw folksonomies.

Users can iteratively refine their search using any combination of controlled vocabulary terms and user contributed tags. To see where these faceted tags come from, find a product and then select Write a Review. I plan to explore further when I have the chance, but at first glance, it looks very nicely done!

Bronson Healthcare in Kalamazoo, Michigan is using what Bruce Sterling calls the Cisco Spime Tracker to solve the wheelchair location problem:

A quick glance at the screen shows exactly where the tagged wheelchairs are located...Patients wait no more than a few minutes for a wheelchair, and we save $28,000 a month by eliminating searches.

Cisco explains that "hospitals are unable to find between 10 and 15 percent of the devices they own...devices are mostly misplaced rather than stolen."

Strange Connections

Johns Hopkins University enables wireless Internet access on their campus shuttle buses, while simultaneously providing real-time shuttle bus tracking in Google Earth. I recommend watching the buses with your kids while singing the wheels on the bus. It's probably even cooler when you're actually on the bus.

Feel free to use these visuals (with attribution) in your articles, blogs, and conference presentations. And, if you prefer to blink outside the book, there's still lots of flickry findability fun in the Laughing Lemur Collection.

With the publication of Ambient Findability, O'Reilly Media continues this tradition of giving readers an opportunity to experience the visionary writing of people like Peter Morville.

Peter Morville's Ambient Findability will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved.

And, after returning from London yesterday, I'm about to wrap up my tri-continental book publicity tour with a visit to Brazil. I'm looking forward to meeting up with information architects and findability fanatics in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. I'm also looking forward to coming home to Ann Arbor and getting some rest. It's been an exciting but exhausting couple of months.

What if Tim Berners-Lee had pitched his idea for the World Wide Web to me back in 1989? That was the strange question dancing through my head after a magical evening with Holly and Bob Doyle.

After a long day teaching IA1, the prospect of dinner with two certified geniuses (both have doctorates in astrophysics from Harvard) was a bit intimidating.

But they turned out to be friendly, down-to-earth folks, and I found Bob's enthusiasm for his latest idea, the memetic web, to be inspiring and contagious.

The proposition, as explained on memography.org, is simple. Create a globally unique string or meme ID. Paste this string into relevant web pages. Wait for search engines to crawl the pages. Then use the meme ID to search with 100% precision and recall. And you can even create an aboutness page to define your meme, so others can use it properly.

Of course, the real challenges are far from simple. What about the known problems of inter- and intra-indexer inconsistency? What about meme ID spamming? And isn't this too complex to achieve widespread adoption?

On the other hand, free tagging has created an unquenchable thirst for specificity. Intentional misspellings like indicatr and statistically improbable phrases like ambientfindability will only take us so far.

So, I'm not totally on board, but I do think Bob's onto something, sorta like TBL back in 1989. What do you think?

The book has been publicly available for less than a week. Only a few days if you count shipping. I'm dying for feedback, but hardly anyone's had a chance to read it. I've been spending way too much time checking the Amazon Sales Rank and scouring Technorati, Google Blog Search, and PubSub for reviews. So, I might as well share what I've found:

Advance Praise

I'm also eternally grateful to these folks for their support and generosity.

"A lively, enjoyable and informative tour of a topic that's only going to become more important."
-- David Weinberger, Author, Small Pieces Loosely Joined and The Cluetrain Manifesto

"I envy the young scholar who finds this inventive book, by whatever strange means are necessary. The future isn't just unwritten--it's unsearched."
-- Bruce Sterling, Writer, Futurist, and Co-Founder, The Electronic Frontier Foundation

"Search engine marketing is the hottest thing in Internet business, and deservedly so. Ambient Findability puts SEM into a broader context and provides deeper insights into human behavior. This book will help you grow your online business in a world where being found is not at all certain."
-- Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., Author, Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

"Information that's hard to find will remain information that's hardly found -- from one of the fathers of the discipline of information architecture, and one of its most experienced practitioners, come penetrating observations on why findability is elusive and how the act of seeking changes us."
-- Steve Papa, Founder and Chairman, Endeca

"Whether it's a fact or a figure, a person or a place, Peter Morville knows how to make it findable. Morville explores the possibilities of a world where everything can always be found--and the challenges in getting there--in this wide-ranging, thought-provoking book."
-- Jesse James Garrett, Author, The Elements of User Experience

"It is easy to assume that current searching of the World Wide Web is the last word in finding and using information. Peter Morville shows us that search engines are just the beginning. Skillfully weaving together information science research with his own extensive experience, he develops for the reader a feeling for the near future when information is truly findable all around us. There are immense implications, and Morville's lively and humorous writing brings them home."
-- Marcia J. Bates, Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles

"I've always known that Peter Morville was smart. After reading Ambient Findability, I now know he's (as we say in Boston) wicked smart. This is a timely book that will have lasting effects on how we create our future."
-- Jared Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering

"In Ambient Findability, Peter Morville has put his mind and keyboard on the pulse of the electronic noosphere. With tangible examples and lively writing, he lays out the challenges and wonders of finding our way in cyberspace, and explains the mutually dependent evolution of our changing world and selves. This is a must read for everyone and a practical guide for designers."
-- Gary Marchionini, Ph.D., University of North Carolina

"Find this book! Anyone interested in making information easier to find, or understanding how finding and being found is changing, will find this thoroughly researched, engagingly written, literate, insightful and very, very cool book well worth their time. Myriad examples from rich and varied domains and a valuable idea on nearly every page. Fun to read, too!"
-- Joseph Janes, Ph.D., Founder, Internet Public Library

Welcome to findability.org: the next generation. In case you haven't noticed, it's a borg. I mean, it's a blog. Yes, after years of quiet resistance, I've succumbed to the call of the blogosphere. I've been assimilated.

In blogging, my most transparent and prosaic goal is to promote my new book, Ambient Findability. I've poured blood, sweat, and tears into this strange text, so I won't be shy about inviting folks to read it.

That said, I'm hoping this blog will go beyond the book. As my classification scheme hints, I'll be writing about authority, business, culture, design, search, ubicomp, etc. And let's not forget the oft-maligned category of miscellaneous. I very much reserve the right to write about seemingly random topics.

So, if you want the original findability, it's there but not here. And if you like this new place, please come again, or better yet, leave a piece of yourself behind.

“Findability precedes usability. In the alphabet and on the Web. You can't use what you can't find.”

- PETER MORVILLE

findability

Findability refers to the quality of being locatable or navigable. At the item level, we can evaluate to what degree a particular object is easy to discover or locate. At the system level, we can analyze how well a physical or digital environment supports navigation and retrieval.